Work and Projects from 2016:

"With extraordinary prescience, Jung actually predicted the Nazi eruption."
"With extraordinary prescience, Santino actually predicted the slow warming and swelling, the hot reddening and burgeoning, the painful building of the ultimate throbbing whitehead, and at last, the bursting of the American hate-pimple complete with the eruption and release of Trump
bile."

Back in the 1980s, I worked painting and plastering apartments on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Donald Trump was beginning his rise to notoriety - in New York anyway. Trump would be railing on about how successful he was, completely oblivious to his inherited position of privilege. I used to tell the guys I worked with, guys from tough, poor backgrounds - living in Queens, the South Bronx - dangerous neighborhoods then - that just their getting from their apartments, getting to the train and getting to work was more of a true heroic accomplishment than this spoiled little rich boy making a million dollars on a real estate sale. Trump came to symbolize all that was going wrong about America.
In that same period, I was beginning to work out my ideas about this "going wrong". Ideas that later became the basis for "Failure Institute" which was started in 1990. The key, it seemed to me, the starting point was the Tet Offensive of late January 1968 and the images of Viet Cong troops on the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon. When I watched the broadcast of the film of that attack on the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite had an odd look in his eye, and I knew something had changed about my country.